Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Tabrys | TV | December 15, 2025
You can easily lose your way in the haze of success, bending and breaking your sensibilities to fit into what’s perceived as a more pleasing shape. But as SNL star Sarah Sherman proves in her first HBO comedy special, Live + In The Flesh, she is still remarkably in touch with her scatalogically inclined gross-out alter-ego, Sarah Squirm. And there’s something kinda creatively heroic about it in a world obsessed with polish, brand maintenance, and career plotting.
Sherman’s aesthetic is anti-aesthetic and anti-conventional. Wholly original. Live + In The Flesh is not what a comedy special looks like if you’re trying to pivot to mainstream success, something that often feels like the ambition for SNL cast members as they approach the 7-year itch (this is Sherman’s 5th season on the sketch series). Instead, it’s a rebellious freak yell with an abundance of ooze, animation, and vividly described bodily functions.
The stage looks like the ghost of Paul Reubens curated a show based on the ’90s toy Monster Face. There are notes of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Alex Winter’s Freaked, Liquid Television, Adult Swim, and other beautifully specific touches created by a team of animators and artists with Sherman’s creative vision as a north star.
The setting of guts and snot, exploding heads, and hanging eyeballs creates a space where Sherman’s analogies about her body hair, solid coiled piss, and “pangea nipple super continent” play up. A gallery of horrors filled with horror stories about the unrelenting grossness of the human body that we all typically try to deny. Sherman’s delivery is similarly unrelenting, energetic, and elevated by her willingness to bust past any supposed “good taste” stop signs to take the conversation to uncomfortable places - but in the best way. Not that we can’t handle it, but that we just weren’t prepared. But she is.
Sherman is having an absolute ball, teasing and taunting the audience, satirizing hack comedy with Seinfeld bass-riff effects and crowd work conventions. She’s showing the kind of supernatural stage presence and self-confidence it takes to hit these levels of self-deprecation. Like Rodney Dangerfield on acid. A lot of acid. You can’t help but be transfixed when someone puts out something not for everyone that is definitely for you - laughing, wincing, gasping, and laughing again. You can’t help but root for Sherman, being weird and brand unsafe.
Through the natural shuffling of the SNL cast this season, Sherman seems to be playing more straight-edged roles than in previous seasons as one of the show’s more long-term cast members. But she’s also coming off a show two weekends ago where she played a drunken raccoon humping Colin Jost’s desk on “Weekend Update.” No matter how far out Sherman has gotten on SNL (and it seems like Lorne Michaels has given her more room to roam than he typically has with others), nothing will compare to this stage show, which certainly counts as an introduction to an audience that might not be fully familiar with her work before and during SNL. One hell of an introduction that proves Sherman is a unique figure in modern comedy, her internal compass leading the way more so than a nose for clapter. It’s risky, but so rewarding for the performer’s soul and those of us who get the difficulty in turning the seemingly low-brow (complimentary) into high art.
Jason Tabrys is a longtime TV critic and interviewer whose work has appeared on Uproxx, Splinter, and LateNighter. You can follow him on Bluesky.
